The Notetaker, a portable personal computer

From "Inside the PARC"...

The Notetaker, a portable personal computer built at PARC in 1978, is rumored to have been the inspiration for the Osborne 1.

The Notetaker ended up as an 8086-based computer that could fit under an airplane seat. It was battery-powered, ran Smalltalk, and had a touch-sensitive screen designed by Thornburg. "We had a custom monitor, we had error-corrected memory, a lot of custom engineering that we would normally only do for a real product," said Fairbairn, the Notetaker's chief hardware designer. "The last year before l left PARC," Tesler said, "I spent flying around the country talking to Xerox executives, carrying Notetaker with me. It was the first portable computer run in an airport. Xerox executives made all sorts of promises: we'll buy 20 000, just talk to this executive in Virginia, then talk to this executive in Connecticut. The company was so pread out, they never got the meeting together. After a year I WaS ready to give up. " While Xerox may not have been ready to run Witll a portable computer, others were. The Osborne I was introduced in 1981 about nine months after Adam Osborne reportedly toured PARC, where pictures of the Notetaker were prominently displayed .

Where am I?

According to the World's Smallest Political Quiz, I am a left-leaning libertarian.

Your Personal Self-Government Score is 90%.
Your Economic Self-Government Score is 60%.

The problem is, many of my responses were "maybe". In government, as in almost every social situation, the results are much more dependent on the specific individuals than general ideologies.

Do objects have too much freedom?

Isaac Gouy quotes, in a comment on Jim's blog...

"But Smalltalk's mechanism suffers from a serious drawback: Initialization is not enforced. new creates objects but does not initialize them... A second drawback with both Smalltalk and Ruby is that initialize, being an ordinary method, does not chain: You must remember to begin your initialize methods with a call to the superclass's initialize method."

Hey, but this just plain, old message sending, as with any object. It just happens that that "object" is a class. That's the advantage, and the tradeoff.

So, in general, inheritance is not as good as composition. But why is *this* message sequence worse than any other?

Do objects have too much freedom?

Social Spreadsheets

Interestingly, Phil Windley blogs sequentially about Tom Malone, Ray Ozzie, and Social Spreadsheets.

What's the interesting connection? See "Object Lens: a Spreadsheet for Cooperative Work" by Tom Malone, whose work (from Information Lens to Object Lens, to OVAL) influenced and was influenced by Ray Ozzie's Lotus Notes.

(Non-ACM link to the OVAL paper. [Manuel Simoni])

MIT's DSpace has all of Malone's working papers as well.

We're *all* clueless about *something*

Don Box reponds...

Indigo (one of the three "pillars of Longhorn") does in fact install on XP and Windows Server 2003. The experience on all three platforms should be comparable.

Yes, I've written before that I think Indigo is one of the gems of MSFT's new work. That accounts for just a small portion of the work though. I can't help but wonder whether the rest of the teams just did not try hard enough, or whether their decisions are more valid from a technical or business perspective.

...I know its fun to paint MSFT as clueless dolts who don't care about developer or customer investments, but the reality isn't quite that black and white.

That's not my intent, but unfortunately can come across in part through my writing style. And that's something I regret. I need an automatic "tone" critic.

FWIW, I don't think MSFT as clueless. They're too good at what they do. I just wish I could be a fly on the wall in Redmond to understand their thinking. (Of course it "their thinking" is itself non-uniform. Certainly the company is full of all kinds of agendas and thought processes.)

BTW, every large system development team I've been a part of has made proportionately bad decisions, including those I've led. There are simply so many variables, so many decisions, and so many pressures from all aspects of the effort, technical, business, and political. If this helps, I am as critical of my own past efforts as I am of those taking place around Longhorn. Moreso, since I know the details and where the skeletons are buried! (Ask me about Late-dot-Slow someday.)

Microsoft has chosen their own inflection point

Wes responds to my inflection point item. But I'm not calling a winner, and I don't think Spolsky was either.

Let me clarify my point. Clearly we are *at* an inflection point for Windows OS, API's, and development. Microsoft chose to create this inflection point rather than a more graduated approach.

I am not predicting which way the market will go. I am definitely not that smart. If I had to make a call, the best I could say is that there will be some middle way, that a Longhorn victory will be hard fought path that extends well beyond 2007. But who knows? An accurate prediction is not the point.

I do think Wes, et al. have missed some key aspects of Joel's message though, reducing the discussion to a binary one of who will win, the old or the new.

One of the key aspects of Longhorn is that, Joel suspects and I've wondered on my blog earlier, *why* everything is rolled into an all or nothing set of dependent technologies. Clearly many parts of Longhorn could be made more independent and portable to older Windows platforms (even Linux, but that's another topic altogether).

The interesting aspect of this issue is exactly that Microsoft has avoided inflection points of this magnitude so far, but with Longhorn they are *creating* their own inflection point. Let's just watch how they play this out; Longhorn is probably more interesting from a business sense than from a technical sense.

Tuple Spaces: Queues or Databases?

Dan Creswell asks: Are tuple spaces more like queues or more like databases? They fit a broad set of niches between message queues and relational or object databases.

Queues can implement variations of one shared data structure: namely, queues.

Spaces can implement variations of shared queues, but also variations of shared arrays, shared dictionaries, and other "shared memory" (i.e. "random access") structures.

A space is typically centralized, where a queue product typically supports distributing the queue's end points around a network.

A space is typically better at heterogenous random access, where a more traditional database (e.g. a relational database) is typically better at homogenous sequential (and relational) access.

Missing the Inflection Point

A point worth pondering...

"Avalon is to Microsoft as microchannel was to IBM."

Time will only tell. I think there are significant problems with nearly every aspect of Longhorn. But that's from a technical perspective. The continuing flury caused by Joel Spolsky's insightful analysis of factions inside Microsoft originated and is supposed to be about the customer and about business.

Microsoft has been better about business than anyone else in the software industry. I have no qualifications to argue with that.

I can't help observing however that the responses from the MSDN camp I've read almost completely miss Spolsky's argument. (McLaws, Box, Wes)

Excercise for the reader: determine which camp *you* belong to. Can you overcome cognitive dissonance and identify three of Joel's significant points that are being missed in the three responses linked above?

Shell tries to come clean

Let's see where this goes...

The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him "really very worried for the planet".

In an interview in today's Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says... "No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can't predict but are probably not good."...

His words follow those of the government's chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.

"You can't slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position," said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March.

Misinterpreting the CMM

Andy Hunt misinterprets the intent of CMM. (But then most of us do.)

The CMM, and even better the CMMI Continuous Representation, is an approach toward incremental process improvement and measuring their progress. Most organizations would not benefit from considering more than a level 3 assessment, and even then only in specific process areas.

This approach to process improvement is incremental. The XP/agile approach is radical. They are neither one ideal, and in fact more complementary than proponents of either tend to realize.

I'd recommend "Making Process Improvement Work" by Potter and Sakry to anyone who wants to understand how to use CMMI, or process improvement generally, effectively.

Reinterpreting Databases

Charles Miller explains why we need better interpretations of the concept of "database".

First International REA Technology Workshop

REA (Resources-Events-Agents) originated as an accounting model. Early on it's application has been with computing. Significant applications of REA have been extended out to inter-enterprise supply chains.

And now there are some interesting results from the First International REA Technology Workshop.

Several participants from Microsoft Business Solutions.

Saved!

From Roger Ebert's move review...

"Saved!" is an important film as well as an entertaining one. At a time when the FCC is enforcing a censorious morality on a nation where 8.5 million listeners a day are manifestly not offended by Howard Stern, here is a movie with a political message: Jesus counseled more acceptance and tolerance than some of his followers think. By the end of the movie, mainstream Christian values have not been overthrown, but demonstrated and embraced. Those who think Christianity is just a matter of enforcing their rulebook have been, well, enlightened. And that all of this takes place in a sassy and smart teenage comedy is, well, a miracle.

"Saved!" is a good satire, approaching greatness. It is a true *satire* half-disguised as a teen movie.

What's really amazing is how little protest has accompanied it on it's way to theaters. How did this get to the mainstream cineplex so quietly?

If you need a Passionate (and laugh-out-loud) antidote to your local megachurch, this is it.

Memes we live by

What makes us (software developers) think most other disciplines are "predictable, schedule-able, reliable, budget-able and robust"?

Making Money with ReST and Smalltalk

From the on-line presentations to Smalltalk Solutions 2004 (PDF)...

A financial house posts trades to NASDAQ using HTTPS client and SSL framework.

• Saves $5000/month over using an MQSeries link to NASDAQ.
• No manual entry. HTML pages are automatically read, filled in, and posted. Report retrieval is automated as well.
• Other companies are still using MQSeries and struggling to manually enter data within the 45 min NASDAQ requirement.
• Implemented in less than a month and running for over a year.

Are Java and dotnet communities like Unix and Windows?

Ted Neward writes...

It's funny, in a way: it's almost as if Java has too much disagreement and disunity within its community, and .NET not enough.

I wonder how much this comes from Java having multiple strong vendors while dotnet has but one. Isn't this like the Unix and Windows communities? Multiple Unix vendors are going to disagree and so divide the communities to a more significant degree than the single Windows vendor.

With a Microsoft product, you accept the faults and go with it. There is at least a perception of no other choice, at least not without some significant compromise. Vendors of other "standards" have to find ways to differentiate and still conform.

Does Microsoft Software Evolve Well?

Ralph Johnson comments on my piece about Microsoft's O/R mapping fiasco...

I think that Microsoft has perfected the notion that software has to evolve. They release early and often. The joke is that their software is never ready until version 3, and I've heard people from Microsoft tell that joke. I don't know the issues behind what you are saying about ADO.NET and Longhorn, but whatever the problem, it is not because Microsoft in general thinks that software will not evolve. When I talk with people from Microsoft, they seem much more aware than most that everything they do is transitory.

Maybe we'd have to discuss specific examples. I don't think Object Spaces is a good example of "release early and often". As I wrote previously, Microsoft is very late to the table with an O/R product. Even now that product is being pushed out, apparently to 2007 at the earliest.

Taking the subject of database connections more broadly, the Microsoft picture looks even worse. They have a history of introducing replacement connection technologies rather than finding a suitable abstraction that can evolve.

These various API's are transitory but they don't seem to be evolutionary. I won't fault Microsoft for packaging software and selling it successfully, and that includes getting software out early and improving it. But when it comes to software design, abstraction, and loose coupling of components, they seem to be getting worse rather than better.

Maybe that's the right approach: put everything into Longhorn, and force and upgrade. Or maybe it's just an accident of bad planning and design. Or maybe it's something else altogether. I don't know, but it doesn't seem evolutionary.

Dining Philospohers and ReST

The discussion on ReST and coordination continues with a really interesting example of the Dining Philosophers.

*All* things considered?

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has taken a look at National Public Radio...

Characterized by conservative critics as "liberal" radio, NPR has more Republican than Democratic voices, and male sources outnumber female sources by nearly four to one.

For example and for example.

But don't get me wrong. I am *not* in favor of a government broadcasting company.

Big Bang?

Another kind of big bang...

Using estimates based on existing research, the five researchers calculated that the energy released by the asteroid strike was equivalent to that in 100 million megatons of TNT. The force of the impact would have thrown debris high into the air, much of it burning up while still in the atmosphere, the report said. This, in turn, would have turned the Earth into a giant broiler oven.